Antenna selection using genetic algorithm for MIMO systems

Recent work has shown that the usage of multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver in a flat fading environment results in a linear increase in channel capacity. But increasing the number of antennas induces the higher hardware costs and computational burden. To overcome those problems, it is effective to select antennas appropriately among all available ones. In this paper, a new antenna selection method is proposed. The transmit antennas are selected so as to maximize the channel capacity using the genetic algorithm (GA) which is the one of the general random search algorithm. The results show that the proposed GA achieves almost the same performance as the optimal selection method with less computational amount.